….Reinventing Reteaching...Hidden Identity activity.
Some time ago, as I was working on the Linear Inequality Unit for my Algebra students, I realized, that after the first day of teaching it, doing the review on Day 2 would very much sound like teaching it again or , if I did it in a hurry, it would sound like a meaningless chant. Either one of them would not only put my students to sleep, but make me bored with it, so this Hidden Rule Identity Activity occurred to me. Given that I knew which rules kids needed to become fluent with, and which errors were likely to happen as they worked on their mastery...why not design a question with 2 versions of an answer, that only differ by one feature. This feature only ( ex. - boundary line solid vs. broken; - shading above vs. below; - reading y-intercept and slope from a wrong form of the equation; …. and so on...) needs to be identified in order to pick and justify the only correct answer. It turned out to be one of those activities that year after year brought a smile to my face: kids got to flex their mind ( talking about information retrieval from passive memory!) and really worked together (likely, one of them remembered something, the other - something else). It worked just as well for the Algebra 2 classes, to bring us back up to speed with the topic.
I always had a hand-written version of it, but now I finally made myself organize it in a proper way and share it with the world.
